Yet another Fast Company inspired post, this time from a posting last month to their blog. Heath Row posted a note about a post in Eric Sink's blog (founder and CEO of SourceGear Corp,) titled "Career Calculus." He says:
Sink continues to suggest that the best way to learn from our mistakes is to process them with a mentor or peer instead of trying to hide them. "This goes against our natural tendency. When we foul something up, the last thing we want to do is shine a light on it so everyone can see what a bonehead we are," he adds. "What we really want to do is cover it up and hope nobody notices. But in doing so we miss a huge opportunity to increase our cluefulness."
By choosing to take the responsibility for managing our careers -- instead of managing people's perception of us -- we can avoid stagnation.
Yes! Throw that man a fish! On October 1st I wrote about how debilitating an over-developed expectation of perfection can be when you are trying to embark on something new. This idea is the antidote to that (so if you're suffering from a bad case perfectionitis, uncork that bottle and take a big soup-spoon full - no, make that two!).
Perfectionism has long been my bane. As a kid on vacation, while my siblings were happily slapping stickers willy nilly into their sticker books, I would wail if I got it slightly askew (you can imagine how relaxing this was for my parents).
Fast forward a year or two, or thirty, to the time I was just starting to do my passion pursuit workshops. I didn't have Clue One about doing a workshop, but I knew the subject matter and I knew I had to take that first step. The day of the workshop I was starting to get spooled about the possibility that it wouldn't go perfectly, when I had an epiphany.
If I did the workshop perfectly, I was cheating myself. Because the workshop wasn't just about the workshop - it was a step toward my longer term vision. If I did it perfectly, it would be because I didn't take any risk, and I wouldn't have learned anything.
Seeing the workshop for what it really was - a step in the direction I wanted to go, rather than a destination - helped me let go of that need for perfection. More than that, it was a paradigm shift. Suddenly, imperfection was the more desirable outcome, because perfection wasn't going to move me any closer to where I wanted to go.
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